A Missive From Sisyphus

I guess it's time for an update on "Europe After Dark."

This is the 10-episode travel-lifestyle TV series about European nightlife that we shot in Europe last summer. Sounds great, right? Shot last summer. Done and done. We contacted the Fox Station Group and showed them a few sample episodes, and they were quite enthusiastic about it. Chris King, who heads ad sales for the company, told me they would be willing to move other programming around to accommodate our show.

The problem is this: we have to sell the advertising ourselves. To do this, we signed with a media buying firm with a lot of experience selling advertising time in the paid programming arena. They tried, but to date have gotten no firm commitments to sponsor the show.

The reason? "Europe After Dark" is an untried entity. It has no track record, no ratings - nothing that could be used to sell its worth as a vehicle for delivering a particular advertiser's message. A solution would be to do a test run in a single market, and that's what my associate Van Sher is doing now.

We'll keep on trudging....

Vince & James

Well, I have to confess that last night was a bit of a let-down.

It had nothing to do with the crowd's reaction to Tolltaker. It was more because the festival people were showing the wrong version of it. Instead of the Blu Ray with the gorgeous sound track and sound mix that I had paid good money for, that I had rushed to get to them a few days earlier, I was sitting in my seat, watching unfold before me the rough cut I had sent in months earlier, with the understanding that I would replace it with the final cut before the screening. Which I did.

It was really too painful to watch. I got up and hurried out of the theater, found the house manager and had some words that I guess could be characterized as tense. He offered to stop the movie, put in the right version, and fast-forward to the spot where the movie was at now.

I declined. That didn't make any sense to me. The movie was half over already. Whatever meager spell it might have cast over the audience would be completely broken if the film were interrupted like that. So I wound up sitting out in the lobby for the rest of the Tolltaker and the movie after that. Kind of a pouty, spoiled-brat thing to do I know, but I was pissed.

So, all in all, not a pleasant evening. But the day did have an upside. On the way to the festival (sitting in traffic that was moving slower than your average lava flow, it should be mentioned), I received a phone call from my friend Vince, who had just watched the Tolltaker.

I've known Vince Jolivette since about 1998, when we were both working as bartenders at the Bel Air Bay Club, which tells everyone that it's in Malibu, but is actually in Pacific Palisades, California. It was a private club for the rich, sitting on one of the few privately owned strips of beach in the state.

All in all, it was a pretty cushy gig, especially if you were working the day shift. Mostly I would just sit and read a book, or gaze out the open window at the Santa Monica Bay.

Vince was that Hollywood stereotype, an aspiring actor who made his living in the food industry. He was from Ohio, and seemed to have brought his entire college graduating class out to California with him. He was always hanging out with friends whom he knew either from college, or from his hometown just outside Cincinnati.

Vince was studying his craft, as every serious artist must do, and was doing so at a studio called Playhouse West in North Hollywood. The day he started, he ran into someone new, who (I believe) was also just starting at the studio. His name was James Franco. The two became fast friends.

Over the years, Vince and James did acting exercises together, worked on scenes, acted in plays. This continued as James began to land ever bigger and more impressive acting gigs. Freaks and Geeks, James Dean (for which he won a Golden Globe), Spiderman.

Vince and James formed a production company together, Rabbit Bandini Productions, which Vince would largely run as James flew off to wherever he was filming a movie. They began producing movies, first shorts, then a few feature-length films, all of which Vince produced.

A couple years after I moved back to the East Coast, James began taking classes at, it seemed, every university in the known world. There was NYU, Columbia and - I believe - Brooklyn College. James had gotten an apartment in Manhattan, which he shared with Vince and a pretty, charming female assistant (whose name, unfortunately, escapes me right now).

Vince, my best friend Jesper (who also knew Vince from the Bel Air Bay Club) and I would hang out in the city, and on, occasion, we would return to the apartment in Chelsea that Vince shared with James. It was a pretty cool apartment. James had eschewed a high-rise penthouse in favor of three floors in a turn-of-the-century (and I mean 20th Century) walk-up.

A really cool feature of the apartment was a roof-top deck, which provided stunning views of both midtown and downtown. I remember on at least one occasion relaxing up there with Vince and the nameless-but-pretty assistant, having beers and basically just hanging out.

James wasn't there, but my friendship with Vince has, from time to time, brought me in contact with him. The first time was back in Los Angeles, where Vince and James did a little scene in a friend's garage and I filmed it. Even then, James was the budding director. He had very specific shots in mind. This wasn't going to be a case of plop the camera on a tripod and get what you can.

Then there was a time I went to his apartment in North Hollywood. This was in an impressive office-retail-apartment complex that really stuck out from all the east Valley blandness that surrounded it. I don't remember much furniture, but it seemed that every horizontal surface was covered with empty, plastic bottles of spring water. Apparently he drank it when he painted (pictures, that is), which I hadn't known previously that he did.

On the East Coast, I met him one time at the premiere of his film Good Time Max at the TriBeCa Film Festival. He had to give a little speech at the beginning, introducing the movie, which he shuffled through rather bashfully. Afterwards, Jesper and I were part of an entourage that took over a restaurant uptown for the rest of the night.

Then there was the time, about a year or so ago, that James was directing a short film (a student film, I believe, for NYU) in Virginia, and asked Jesper and me to do him a favor. The production was renting about ten rooms at a hotel in the town of Suffolk for about a week and wanted to work a barter deal with the hotel whereby the production would get a steep discount if they produced a short, promotional video for the hotel. Knowing that Jesper and I do those kind of videos for a living, he called us.

After the shoot, we went back down about a week later to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage. The movie was a short called Herbert White and the lead role was played by the actor Michael Shannon, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Revolutionary Road. An Oscar-nominated star. For a student film. You can do it if you're James Franco.

They had assembled a casual, relaxed crew that gelled well together. About half were classmates of James' from NYU, and the other half were local kids from the community college. By the time Jesper and I got there, they had gotten into the kind of groove any film crew (hopefully) gets into, where everyone is one big family, and it seems like they've known each other forever.

There were a couple memorable moments from the two days we spent with the production. One location was a derelict old shack of a house that some members of the crew believed was haunted. After the production wrapped at that location, James and Michael posed for a photograph, sitting on the porch in a pair of battered lawn chairs. Just before (or after - I'm not sure) the picture was taken, there was a loud crack of splintering wood and the porch beneath James gave way, tumbling him off the chair and onto his back in the dirt. He landed laughing.

Another moment was when the cast and crew were assembled at a farmhouse that was kind of serving as headquarters for the production. It was the last day of shooting, and everyone was having lunch. The atmosphere was relaxed, even festive. One of the Virginia kids was having a birthday, and James presented him with a cake and did a little mock interview, which I taped.

A little later, I was chatting with James, and he asked about the work we did at Reel Stuff. I told him some of our projects, including Living Tomorrow, a 15-episode original series for The Discovery Channel that we had shot in Europe a few years before. Vince was the host of the series.

"Wait! That was you?," James asked. "I wondered how Vince got that gig."

Anyway, enough of the reminiscing. Once again, Vince called me yesterday after he had watched the Tolltaker. He was very enthusiastic about it, and offered one or two suggestions for "taking it to the next level," so to speak. The main suggestion was to cut a version of it that was substantially shorter. This would make it more palatable to agents, who are often the key to getting movies made in Hollywood (and my overall goal is to get a Tolltaker feature made).

"No agent's going to want to sit through a 23-minute short film," Vince said. The ideal length is 12 to 15 minutes. So I'll cut a shorter version, which Vince said he would take, along with the feature-length Tolltaker screenplay, to James' agents at CAA. After that, who knows?

So, that's one iron in the fire. There are certainly no guarantees, so the wisest thing would be to press ahead with submitting Tolltaker to film festivals, racking up as many awards, views and "Likes" on Facebook as we can. So, to Tolltaker people everywhere, I repeat the prime directive:

Spread the Virus.

Gazing Into the Depths

Now that it’s finished, I look at “The Tolltaker” and ask myself: is it any good?

I think I’m the last person to be able to judge that. I’m much too close to it. I know every frame, and every flaw announces itself to me with the subtlety and finesse of a fog horn.

I hope it’s good. If “goodness” equals dedication and hard work – not to mention sacrifice, particularly of money – then “The Tolltaker” is superb. But of course, life isn’t fair that way. Nor should it be. I’m sure people put a lot of time and effort – not to mention expense – into Battlefield Earth. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

If goodness equals sincerity, then I believe the Tolltaker wins points. This is a story I honestly wanted to see told. Why? As I’ve said before, the setting and circumstances remind me of growing up myself in the Philadelphia area in the 1970’s. For that reason I tried to pack it with as many “cultural markers” as I could.

But beyond that, I really felt for the character of Bobby. I sympathize with a confused and anxious boy, an outsider, wounded by life at an early age, and endowed with sad wisdom as a result.

There are so many books I read when I was a kid that were about some youthful hero stumbling into a fantastic – or terrifying – alternate world. I guess Alice in Wonderland was the first of this type written. The first of the modern era, anyway. Heroes have been venturing into the netherworld for various reasons since the very dawn of story telling.

Am I over-thinking it? Am I making connections and deriving levels of meaning that others just don’t see? I know how easy it is for an artist to go into obsessive detail about his own work, in the mistaken belief that others share his enthusiasm with this new creation. I’ve got to stay on the look-out for that tendency in myself.

I think I must have watched Tolltaker at least 500 times so far. Even so, I’m still making discoveries in it. Levels of meaning that could be inferred. I ask myself: did I put that there? Did I know I put that there? Did I know the reason?

Not consciously. But then story-telling isn’t entirely a conscious process. The wellsprings of inspiration are in the unconscious, which is why sometimes a story will pop up fully-formed into a writer’s mind. According to Jim Sneddon, that’s how the Tolltaker novel came to him. The unconscious has already been working on it, putting it together below the notice of the conscious mind, and by the time the writer goes looking for the story – sitting down to actually write it – the unconscious mind hands it over, practically ready for the type-setter.

And what are these “wellsprings of inspiration,” really? It feels like it’s almost coming from somewhere outside my mind. That, I understand, is a common phenomenon, and psychologists have talked and written about it often. You should read William James’ book Varieties of Religious Experience for an eye-opening description of inspiration – both divine and otherwise – from a psychological perspective. It’s one of the definitive works on the subject.

Carl Jung has proven tremendously helpful in shedding some light on this question. I remember reading his books on archetypes and the collective unconscious (which, of course, is the title of his most famous book), and gobbling each one up greedily. The insights were like little bits of light, little bits of fresh air, and I eagerly followed from one to the next. The result, I believe, has given me an understanding of stories that’s both universal and personal.

Of course, to palliate anyone who’s rolling his/her eyes right now, I have to say that I absolutely don’t consider myself a master story-teller. The Tolltaker doesn’t provide evidence of that, and, besides, it was based on a book written by someone else.

But I do believe I have an understanding of story-telling and story arcs that’s both intuitive and intellectual. Or at least I’m starting to. I can watch a movie, say it’s terrific, and understand – both on an intellectual and intuitive level – why I feel that way.

That’s a long way from saying that I’m capable myself of producing something that meets those lofty standards. But I’m learning, and each time out, I hope to do better. In my perfect future, I’ll look back at this, my first film (but hopefully not my last) and shake my head in embarrassment at how rough it is.

That’s something to shoot for, right?

What the Hell's a Preditor?

I'll tel you what a Preditor is. It's one of those "creative economy" jobs that have been created in recent years, thanks largely to the Internet, but also to the availability of cheap, professional video production equipment in the past 15 years or so.

The term comes from a combination of its two main functions: "producer" and "editor." By "producer," what is generally meant is that you run around with an ENG camera (Electronic News Gathering) shooting whatever anyone might care to look at. Then, when you get home to your computer (typically a Macintosh of some sort running Final Cut Pro as the editing software), you edit it all together. Thus: Producer-Editor. Preditor.

The main forum for this kind of work is the Internet, but you can also find yourself making corporate videos for distribution on DVD, content for TV networks' video-on-demand services, and being a shooter/editor for-hire for a cable network TV show.

With my business partner Jesper Olsson, I co-own Reel Stuff Entertainment, a Philadelphia-area (south Jersey, to be precise) production company that has completed something like 600 projects in the past five years, including an original series for The Discovery Channel, as well as content for the Travel Channel, AOL, Lakeshore Entertainment, AT&T and a long list of others.

This work has taken me to Europe four times in the past five years. One of those trips was for Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts, which had us produce travel videos for seven of their properties in Europe & North America. I would shoot the video at one property, edit it on the train to the next destination, then upload it to the client once I arrived.

Last summer, I was in Europe for about six weeks, shooting "Europe After Dark," a travel/destination TV series about nightlife in Europe. The host is Sean "Hollywood" Hamilton, the afternoon-drive DJ at New York City's dance radio powerhouse WKTU-FM. We don't have a network behind us - we shot it the preditor way, on a wing and a prayer during a road trip through Europe, financed privately by an investors' group based in Hatboro, PA.

The idea is to buy air time on TV stations ourselves, then sell the advertising. It's a model that's become increasingly common, although there's no guarantee that the TV station - or the network, if it's an affiliate - will accept the programming even if you show up with cash in hand. Fortunately, "Europe After Dark" received a rather enthusiastic response from the Fox Television Group, and they said they'll clear time on the schedule for it on their affiliates in about 20 top television markets around the country. The challenge now is to get the advertisers, and if we don't do that, this show is going nowhere. So you'll be hearing about that drama as it unfolds.

You'll also be hearing about The Tolltaker. This is a 25-minute short film I made that combines live action and animation to tell the story of a young boy in Northeast Philadelphia in 1973, whose father is MIA in Vietnam and who is being set upon by a fearsome underground demon called the Tolltaker that demands to be paid its "toll."

It's taken me four years, but the Tolltaker is finally finished (after a fashion), and is set to screen at its first film festival this month: the New Jersey Film Festival. I've submitted it to festivals all over the country, but I'm glad that this is the first one to accept it. It's good to start out playing to a hometown crowd.

I actually blogged for a while about making this film for a local newspaper, the Courier Post in Cherry Hill, N.J. Those blog entries are no doubt still around somewhere, and I will endeavor to find them and re-post them, so that these new blog posts will combine with the earlier ones to create a complete account of the Tolltaker's creation.

It's an ambitious project. Aside from employing about a dozen animators (who turned the downstairs of my home in Cherry Hill, N.J. into a mini animation studio), we also built a 60-foot-long Vietcong tunnel set in an old warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia. Our materials? Mostly old, wooden warehouse pallets.

As I write this, the final sound mix is being completed by the Emmy-Award winning composer and sound designer Rodney Whittenberg, working from a studio in the basement of his 200-year-old farm house in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Tomorrow, I get an audio file from him, which I lay into the Tolltaker timeline on Final Cut Pro. I then export a Quicktime movie, take it to Mike Brand (who was also the director of photography for the film), and get a Blu Ray disk that I will hand deliver to Al Nigrin, director of the NJ Film Festival, on Monday. This is already an extended deadline, and I still am cutting it as close to the last possible moment that I can. More drama.

Other festivals I've submitted to include Sundance, the Hollywood Film Festival, the Big Apple Film Festival and some others I can't think of right now. I'm waiting to hear back from all of them, so you'll be waiting to hear back with me.

So, anyway - that's enough of a blog post for now, attention spans (including mine) being what they are. There are websites aplenty you can check out, including the one for Reel Stuff:

www.ReelStuff-Entertainment.com

Europe After Dark:

www.EuropeAfterDark.tv

The Tolltaker trailer:
http://www.vimeo.com/6323248

Europe After Dark YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/EuropeAfterDark

And the Reel Stuff YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/reelstuff44

And, finally, Facebook. For Europe After Dark:

http://www.facebook.com/EuropeAfterDark

And the Tolltaker:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Tolltaker/140213159398654

And finally, finally: you can follow my tweets at: @ReelStuffenter

See you next time.